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The ESCO platform for a collaborative NKOS development

The ESCO project is a European Union (EU) project of the Directorate General Employment (DG-EMPL) in co-operation with the DG Education and Culture (DG-EAC) and with the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop). The objective is to set up a hub vocabulary to establish interoperability and transparency on the EU labour market. The ESCO vocabulary covers Occupations, Skills and Qualifications. As a hub vocabulary it intends to facilitate exchange of curriculum vitae (CV) and job postings between the national Public Employment Services (PES) of the EU countries.

The ESCO objective is very challenging because besides fostering and re-using KOS standards it will also need to take care of the evolutions taking place when the mapped vocabularies are updated. ESCO will be available through web browsing via

the ESCO portal

a collaborative ESCO taxonomy platform

and via various web API services:

standard linked data services (RDF and HTML)

dedicated web services (REST/JSON) SPARQL end-point

The presentation discusses the approaches taken at the technical level ESCO v1 in order to tackle these problems. This includes

a strategy for the build-up and maintenance of ESCO

an approach for tracking the evolution of ESCO

the services provided by ESCO to human and application agents

the register of vocabulary versions

The objective of the presentation is to explain how we work, get feedback, and possibly, if there is interest, make preparations to start collaboration and standardization initiatives (with academic, private and government sectors).